And that’s a wrap – other than clipping a few threads.  I started this one sometime last year; it’s a sampler based off of several different quilts in Amy Ellis’ “Modern Heritage” book. She had a suggested layout and I followed it for the most part although I added in quite a bit of negative space around various blocks so that I could gradually increase the size of it instead of having huge white borders around it.  Since I had it planned to go on the bed in the guest room which doesn’t get regular traffic in there, I took some chances and tried a few things with the quilting.

One thing I wanted to practice was how to crop inside and outside of an area.  For instance, the white, and even much of the smaller blocks in here, are quilted using an all-over design. It may be hard to see in some of these picures, but I used a quilting pattern that was mostly horizontal and vertical lines since that’s the most common type of quilting done on modern quilts.  But in some of the larger blocks – the Greek crosses and Kansas City stars for instance – I cropped inside of them to clear the area as I continued down. There are 2 ways to do this; one involves stitching up to the cropped area with jumps as needed. That left threads to be trimmed on the back that I hadn’t thought about because I have my machine set up to jump instead of tie off if the area is smaller than 6″.  It turns out, that’s a pretty wide jump.

The second thing I tried on another block was to stitch around the perimeter of the cropped area as I came up to it. That was okay on the crosses, but the stars are larger than the throat space on my long arm and because of that, it started to stitch through what I had marked as the “bottom” of the star when reality it was just as far down as it could stitch without advancing. In other words, there are some small areas where it looked like I didn’t crop at all. It’s a good thing I don’t leave the machine when it’s stitching, even though that’s totally doable using a Pro Stitcher.

Once I was done with the all-over quilting, I went back and picked a circular pattern for each of the areas I had cropped inside. Then I found out that the numbers associated with resizing it are relative to that specific area, and aren’t measured in inches or centimeters. That created an entirely different conundrum – the pattern was larger in some quadrants than others.  All in all, it’s good enough to put on a bed and although there are a number of things on here that I would do differently, I’m glad I went through the process. I have 2 more quilt tops that are finished and on one of them, I may try this technique again but use what I learned to see if I really retained the information!